LOR Power Usage Utility

The LOR power usage utility is an Excel spreadsheet that can create a graph of current use versus time for a given Light-O-Rama v2 sequence. It can be used to aid in designing your layout and sequencing your lights to avoid the possibility of drawing too much current from a given controller or power feed circuit.

The current version is v1.6a dated Nov. 2, 2009 and can be downloaded from here. This latest updates contains the following major changes. The complete changelog is at the bottom of the page.

Sequence file no longer remains open after reading its data. This was causing users to not be able to save the file in the sequence editor while the power usage utility was open.

Fixed program to work with LOR2 sequence files that may or may not have a blank line every other line. (This was causing only 1/2 of the data to be read from the more recent LOR2 files)

Sequences files with more than 500 channels are now read in properly to the channel list

Note: Due to the nature of this utility it is CPU intensive. Long sequences or many channels make take a minute or two to process.

Details

This utility will not process LOR1 sequence files or encrypted LOR2 files. If you have a licensed and registered copy of the Light-O-Rama S2 software you should not have a problem using this utility.

To be able to use the utility you will need to have Microsoft Excel installed on your computer. It was created using Excel 2003 and has been tested to work with all Excel versions from Excel 97 through Excel 2007.

The first time you run the utility you will need to extract your channel list from one of your sequences so that you can then add data on how much current each channel uses. You will only need to do this once if all of your sequences use the same channels (which is likely).

The channel list will also have a column labelled 'Group' which can be used to group unit sides together on the chart. This may be useful if you have different power feeds going to your controllers in that you can see the current draw from each power feed. If all of your controllers use the same power feed this column can be left blank.

If you have a channel list that was created using v1.4 or earlier, it will be updated to the new format the first time it is accessed. All of your existing data will remain intact, only 2 new columns will be added. One column for Unit ID which will already have the proper data filled in and another column named 'Group' that allows you to group controllers together in the chart.

Once you have selected both a sequence file and a channel list you can then choose to 'Create Charts'. The utiltiy will then use both the sequence file and channel list to create another worksheet in order to store the amperage data. It can take a few minutes to process the entire file during which time the data is being extracted from the sequence file. Once all of the data has been extracted a chart will appear showing the total current usage versus time for the sequence.

There is a drop down combobox just above the chart that will allow you to choose what data to display in the chart. The data can be displayed by each side of the controller, a controller's total current draw, each power feed's current draw or the total current draw for the entire sequence.

Open source - If you know how to edit VBA within Excel you can customize to your own needs.

Note: The utility is very CPU intensive while extracting the data. I would recommend a minimum 1GHz processor. It will run on a slower computer but will take longer.

Possible Improvements In Upcoming Releases

Calculation of kilowatt-hour usage for the sequence.

Known Limitations

Below are the known limitations for the utility. I would estimate that 99% of the people using this utility will not be affected by these. If you think you have found another limitation, please let me know as I may be able to change the code to correct it.

Microsoft Excel has a limit of only displaying 32,000 data points per series on a chart. Since the utility breaks down the sequence into 0.1 second increments this means that currently only the first 53.3 minutes (3200 seconds) of a sequence can be displayed in the chart. If your sequence file is less than 53.3 minutes, there is no problem. I am currently working on solution to this problem.

Microsoft Excel limits worksheets to only 255 columns of data. Since I store the data for the individual controller sides, controller totals, and group data in columns, this means that there is a theoretical limit of approximately 84 sixteen channel controllers for a sequence.

Changelog

11/2/09 - v1.6a

Squence file is now properly closed after reading its data. This was causing users to not be able to save the file in the sequence editor while the power usage utility was open.

10/4/09 - v1.6

Fixed program to work with LOR2 sequence files that may or may not have a blank line every other line. (This was causing only 1/2 of the data to be read from the more recent LOR2 files)